Hero Round Table Live Blog

I start at 1:30 CST sharp today, and all you need to do is open this page to watch the complete talk, live, for free.

Note: I originally announced I would speak at 1:45. The time slot was changed.

Better yet, by commenting on this blog post you can ask questions about the talk. I encourage you to comment multiple times with different questions that come up as the talk goes on—ask anything you think of as soon as it comes up.

Since it will be a short while before I can answer (since I will, after all, be in the middle of a talk) I also encourage you to riff off each other’s questions and provide your own thoughts, answers and commentary. This will not only make the comments more fun for everyone, it will also be incredibly helpful for me.

One of the presentations I was able to see made the claim that heroes are the most important thing for solving the world’s problems. That is not the case. Heroes ultimately can never solve problems, all they can do is solve particular instances of problems. Heroes are societal first responders, what they do is a good thing, and without them, the world would be worse off. However, our society lacks the rest of the emergency response system in this metaphor.

Let’s take poverty as an example. Individual acts of charity will never solve the problem of poverty, because it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, which is a society built on domination and exploitation.

It is the same with rape. Individuals can stop individual instances of rape, but as long as society continues to portray women as sex objects first, and human beings second (or worse), and we continue to have a culture that blames the victim, rape is going to continue to be a problem.

It may be the case that I am conflating the idea of heroism with individualism, but the message of the speaker was not to impart the idea that “we can make a difference (as a group)”, but rather that “we can make a difference (each of us individually, as an ‘I’.” On the contrary, we can not make a meaningful change to the problems of the world as a whole by acting individually.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a paper on the necessity of collective action for the preservation of individual liberties that I wrote last year:

“Collective action is necessary for emancipatory change. No individual acting on their own, no matter their conviction, can advance the cause of liberty; the defense of freedom requires a group effort. The key figures that we remember as advocates of liberty; Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., for example, all had the support of others whose names are not carved as deeply into the walls of history; they did not act alone.”